This invention relates generally to the field of food processing and more particularly to the field of an apparatus to apply coatings or breadings to food products.
Many food products are covered with a coating or breading to enhance the flavor and facilitate cooking of the product. Where preparation time is not of great concern, the food product, such as a chicken breast, can be manually coated by rolling the chicken breast in the coating material and patting or massaging the coating material directly on the chicken. Manual breading or coating is well-known to provide the most complete and uniform coverage for a particular food item.
However, in commercial settings where preparation time is of the essence, manual breading has given way to machines that automatically coat a food product. Food product coating machines come in different varieties that are often dependent upon the type of food being breaded. Many commercial and fast-food restaurants use a drum type breader to coat food, such as parts of chicken, with a breading or fine flour mixture. One type of breader is represented in U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,525 to Stewart. This breader unit includes a tilted rotatable drum with an apertured interior wall that is configured to tumble the food parts as they are gravity fed to the output end of the drum. In a variation of this concept, elements are affixed to the interior wall of the rotating drum to help tumble the food parts as they progress along the length of the drum, as depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,937,744 to Nothum, Sr. et al. While many drum breaders rely on gravity to propel the food parts from the input to the output end, others utilize a rotating spiral to help push the food along its breading path, as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,855,965.
Such traditional drum breaders and the associated equipment often provide an insufficient or inconsistent coating as the traditional breaders often compartmentalize the food from the coating and only dump or sprinkle the coating onto the food. Traditional breaders also typically require a lot of floor space which poses two problems in the restaurant environment. First, the floor space taken up by the automated breader is floor space that is unusable for any other purpose. In a kitchen environment, any floor space tends to be premium. Second, if the breading apparatus were to malfunction, no value added process can occur at that station.
There is a need for an automatic coating or breading apparatus that can apply a consistently even coating to food parts. Optimally, the apparatus would emulate manual coating, while doing so in a high production, quick turnaround setting. There is a further need for a breading apparatus that minimizes the amount of floor space used and that does not create dead space when it is not being used.